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> Reclaiming Mother's Day
> Church posts GPS coordinatesMay, 2003
A group of women in Sherborn, many of them members of the Pilgrim Church UCC, are trying to reclaim the original meaning of Mother’s Day.
The group, called EveryMother’s Day, wants to restore the annual holiday to its roots – the day in 1872 when Julia Ward Howe proposed a “Mother’s Day of Peace” on which women would rise up and oppose war.
The group was started by Ridgely Fuller, a member of Pilgrim Church who last year, disturbed by the toll taken by the conflict in the Middle East, invited women of all faiths to meet at her house and talk about what could be done.
The women formed EveryMother’s Day, and began contacting family and friends, local colleges and their churches and temples about the idea. They even distributed flyers outside Sherborn’s Town Meeting, and have done the same at other local events.
The women urge people to skip Mother’s Day cards and flowers and to instead make a donation, in their mother’s name, to an international peace organization.
More information is available at everymothersday.org.
Many churches post directions and even maps on their Web sites to help newcomers find them.
But Newton Highlands Congregational Church has gone one step further – posting its Global Positioning System coordinates online so anyone with a GPS system can find the church at the touch of a button.
“We are finding that increasingly more and more visitors check us out on the web before they visit,” said Senior Pastor Ken Baily. He added that a good number of newcomers come from out of town, and need directions.
One member of the church mentioned to Baily that a lot more people are getting GPS locators in their cars and suggested posting the coordinates. He used his system to find the church’s address.